News that Netflix will pay WarnerMedia $100 million to keep showing Friends for another yearset tongues wagging in the streaming-video world, but it actually may be a very good deal for the streamer as it transitions away from reliance on licensed fare from traditional Hollywood.

Friends, one of TV history's most successful series as both a first-run show and through a lucrative international syndication afterlife, has enjoyed a resurgence on Netflix from both old fans and new, many of them Millennials or younger who can't be bothered to watch TV the old-fashioned way.

Those Netflix devotees have been working their way through Friends' mammoth 236-episode catalog. Now friends on social media share Friends' moments in a way that just wasn't possible back when Ross and Rachel were first in permanent mutual circling mode. On Facebook alone, the official Friends show page has more than 20 million likes. The show's living-room couch and coffeehouse set are even a central attraction on the pricey tour of the Warner Bros. studio lot in Burbank, Calif., and still generate plenty of licensed merchandise sales too.

So all that said, even by Netflix's own standards, paying $100 million for a year of Friends binging still could be a very good deal, even if it's more than three times the previous price.

In part, that's because $100 million doesn't go very far in Hollywood these days. Back when Netflix was still an up-and-comer handing out what the studios considered found money for their old shows, it commissioned Beau Willimon and David Fincher to adapt a relatively obscure British series as one of its first original shows.

The result, House of Cards starring Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright,won seven Emmys and real street cred for Netflix at a time when it was mostly a place for reruns and old movies.

House of Cards (and Orange is the New Black) arguably helped turn Netflix into the world-conquering disruptor of the old orderthat it now is. The awards the show garnered drove consumer awareness, prestige value and subscriber signups for a service that until then was far from essential. The price tag for that payoff: $200 million for two seasons. And that was for 20 episodes, not 236.

With Friends, Netflix gets a far better deal, for a far smaller share of its programming dollars. It secures another year of rights to a certifiable and established hit with a boatload of episodes, a global must-watch that needs no additional marketing and can play across all 192 countries where Netflix operates.

And given the declining value of money since House of Cards' first season, and the rapidly escalating cost of programming as streaming services jostle for shows that viewers will pay for, this is looking more and more like a bargain. It's not even that big a chunk of Netflix programming spending, which, depending on your accounting, is either $8 billion the company said it would spend, or $12 billion if you count long-term programming obligations.

As well, Netflix may be able to keep showing Friends when this latest deal ends, and for far less than 2019's price. WarnerMedia owner AT&T plans to launch its own streaming service late next year with content from Warner, HBO and Turner. AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson has already signaled at an investor conference earlier this fall that Friends is "content we definitely want on our platform."

The deal between Netflix and AT&T is non-exclusive, so Friends will almost certainly appear on the WarnerMedia service by 2020. But Netflix and WarnerMedia are already negotiating whether to also keep it on Netflix. Netflix might even pay a much lower rate because the show would be on both services.

And don't be surprised if you see more deals like this in Hollywood as traditional media companies find their way through the coming online-focused, on-demand universe. While Disney is pulling its content from Netflix ahead of the late-2019 launch of its service, other companies are continuing to happily collect checks from the streamer. Even those launching services, such as WarnerMedia, need to make money from their content while those services slowly build a worthwhile audience. That will take time and lots of money.

And there are companies such as Viacom, which continues to cut multiple content deals with Netflix, including one for its Nickelodeon network to provide children's programming. Under CEO Bob Bakish, Viacom clearly has decided it doesn't have the scale to compete with the tech giants and newly steroidal Hollywood giants such as Disney and WarnerMedia.

But there's plenty of money to be made supplying everyone else with shows. Who says we all can't be Friends?